


Sins of the Mother - Roose Bolton

by merrylulu



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Past Violence, Rape/Non-con Elements, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 08:32:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19460278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrylulu/pseuds/merrylulu
Summary: Roose Bolton sees a ghost





	Sins of the Mother - Roose Bolton

The last time Roose Bolton saw Mehran of the Summer Isles, his hair, up to his shoulder and shining with the vitality of his then youth blew with every toss of a throwaway wind. And his cock stirred in the mere presence of a woman, any woman. Didn't matter who she was or what she looked like.

Granted, he feels his smallclothes strain at their seams in this very moment, as he watches the brown girl lift a bale of hay onto her head and walk with the other servants into the stables. But it's just that she looks so much like her. So much like his Mehran.

The first time he had seen the strange girl, she'd been on a horse-drawn wagon with seven other young women riding into Winterfell with hopes of finding employment under the new lord and freshly-appointed Warden of the North. He remembers he'd been standing at the mouth of the cavern leading to the cages where Ramsey keeps his hounds, as he is now. Arms crossed behind his back, hands gloved to keep out the cold. A fur-lined cloak thrown over his shoulders brushed the snow-ladden grounds where he'd stood overseeing his workers pull down and burn the last of the Stark banners in piles as high as his chest.

He'd seen her and the breath had left his body with a swiftness that could not be natural. As if his cloak suddenly weighed the same as the stallions pulling that wagon, he'd nearly collapsed in shock. Were he in a different place at a different time with different people to bear witness to his moment of weakness, he might have dropped to his knees and bent himself in half to pray to whatever god sat listening that day.

For when he last saw Mehran of the Summer Isles, he was a boy of twenty and two; new and green to the ways of the world, but old and studied in the art of suffering--a craft entirely peculiar to the Bolton house.

When he last saw Mehran of the Summer Isles, he and ten other men had ridden on horseback from the Dreadfort for a day and a night before they found the camp set up in the forests alongside Karhold. Mehran's troupe had thought to find a haven on the land belonging to the family one of their own had married into. Roose and his men hung and gutted every last one of them and waited until the moon hung high in the sky for Mehran's return. She never came.

A fortnight later, a little bird sang a little song, and he traded his ten men for one archer with an arrowhead set aflame. A day after, he watched the ship on which Mehran and her new husband sought to escape the North burn in the Weeping Waters. There were no survivors.

Or so he thought.

As is the case with every servant girl heating his bathwater, or fetching him a whetstone for his blade, or polishing his saddle, Roose knows not her name. He eyes her bending at the waist to better hear the gossip spilling from the lips of another domestic, fibers of hay twisted and knotted in the frizzy tangle of black hair on her head. Her hips are wide and inviting. Her breasts are full and generous, the hard tips of her nipples visible even through the thick material of her frock. Tall, taller than he. Taller than most, as Mehran was.

Mehran had run from him a full year before he had found her and that Karstark boy she took for a husband, and killed them both on the river. A year is enough time. Enough time to know her man and have him know her. Enough time to spawn.

But there had been no survivors, of this, Roose is sure. He'd sat on the bank of the river for hours after the debris sunk to the bottom and the fires were reduced to steam and smoke. Flaying knife in the palm of his hand, vengeance and hurt rising like bile in his throat. It may have been the dead of night, but if anyone had fled from that ship, he knows he would have seen and later rinsed out the dried flecks of their blood from underneath his fingernails. He knows.

The brown-skinned girl lays a palm flat on her chest, just above her breasts and laughs at something her friend says, her eyes crinkling. Roose's jaw hardens along with something else between his legs. Perhaps, he doesn't know all that much.

The crunch of snow sounds first from behind him, then ends to his left. He hears her before he sees her, Lady Walda. The ragged huffs and puffs of her breathing, even as all she does is stand still, is a stamp belonging wholly to her. It's cold as balls in Winterfell, yet beads of sweat birth at her temples and forehead, rolling down the fat expanses of her cheeks and ending where her chin would be were it not for the hills of flesh born from years and years of easy living in her father's home, and now in his home, as his wife.

Repulsion at her very existence strikes Roose so hard, he wonders if he's just been backhanded by the gods themselves. When he looks across the courtyard, to where the girls chatter and filter in and out of those stables, when he sees the thick mess of her hair breach from under the shadow of the portcullis with that bale on her head, he knows he's in fact been backhanded. Though the print on his face belongs to an entirely different hand.

This hand is brown and small and calloused. This hand pats his head and by some magic, tells him of his destiny. That he is fated to once again be haunted by the tantalizing visage of woman he can never possess. This hand runs its knuckles down his cheek, and laughs.

This hand is wrong.

Mehran, when she and her band of actors had arrived in the North, had been a free woman. She'd belonged to no house. Roose had no legal basis to lay a hand upon her and argue that he get to keep that hand. This girl...this brown girl. This servant girl...

She is his. Entirely his. Irrevocably his. And he means to inform her of this now that he has the time.

"It's quite cold out here, my lord." Lady Walda rubs her stomach, tuffs of white clouds escaping her lips with her every word. "You'll come inside, won't you? I'll have the servants cook up a nice broth for you. The meaty one you like so much."

The Young Wolf and his pack are dealt with, and his bastard Ramsey has his fun with the Ironborn welp. Tywin Lannister keeps his faith in King's Landing. Winterfell works as it should.

He's free to think now. And if he's free to think, he's free to fuck.

"Or maybe you'd like a warm bath? Yes. It's quite cold, it is."

Mehran evaded his advances all the way to the grave. This girl--his girl--would have no such freedom.

She emerges from the entrance of the stables, dusting her hands and rubbing them down the thickness of her thighs. He rather likes them like that: thick. Always has.

Huff, puff. Huff, puff.

Lady Walda, her hands clasped at her chest, takes two steps in front of him and cocks her head to the side, much like one of Ramsey's mutts.

Huff, puff. Huff, puff.

Her eyebrows, too thin, draw in the middle of her ample forehead. She sweats still. "My lord?"

Roose regards her as he has these thoughts of the brown girl he never had and the brown girl they'd have to cut him down to stop him from having. He waits for something, anything to awaken in his chest.

He knows he felt things as a boy. Things like shame and guilt. He knows he felt something like the aforementioned hearing Mehran's screams as she burned alive. He steels himself in preparation of those feelings and their accompanying repercussions, and is shocked to find he isn't shocked when nothing in his beaten, blackened heart rouses.

He imagines himself with the servant girl, her legs wide and open as he lines the swollen head of his cock up to her opening. She's wet, ready for him. He sees himself thrust into her, his eyes rolling into the back of his head in the throes of a pleasure he has until that moment never known. Nothing.

No shame, no guilt. He'd loaded them onto that ship with Mehran and the Karstark miscreant and set them ablaze. And the next day, when Ned Stark and his bannermen rode to the river to see what all the fuss was about, when they pulled what remained out of the dark water and gave them a proper funeral by pyre, Roose watched them burn again. Gone, just like that.

He blinks and finds it in himself to lift the corners of his lips into a smile for Lady Walda. She beams as he does. Unclasping his hands from where they rested at his back, he rubs his fingers over his eyes. A sigh leaves him.

"As soon as night falls, have the dark servant girl sent to my chambers. Tonight, you shall find somewhere else to lay your head." His eyes leave Lady Walda's paling face and her fading smile. They find the girl leaning on an arm on a steadily emptying wagon as men heft drums of grain from its depth and roll them across the grounds to the storage rooms. His eyes find hers. She stares for a second longer than she should before her eyes drift and she straightens, falling back into the line of girls carrying the horse feed. "Try not take too long on your quest, my lady. I hear it's quite cold out here."

.

"Maybe he wants to know where you're from."

From the other side of the barn, the oldest of the castle hands stills. She, called Doma of a no-name house, a thin woman with pink cheeks flushed from the cold and crows feet around her hard blue eyes, regards the owner of the voice with a scowl cold enough to rival the severity of the snowstorm outside. The girl who broke the silence after the Lady Walda Bolton had dragged her feet past the cattle pens and, shoulders slumped and eyes swollen with tears, delivered the Lord's command earlier, is a tiny thing.

A young thing. With bony arms and elbows, and bonier knees. Most likely some farmer's girl child with whom they didn't know what to do. Too small to survive a life on her back with her legs wide in a den of iniquity, and too weak to lift a hoe to harvest and be worth something. So she was sent to the castle in the North to earn some coin. Her unlearnedness is evident in her innocent doe eyes as she nods her head in agreement with the nonsense she's just spewed from her mouth. The slight smile playing at her dry lips as she beams at the brown woman, sure as eggs the reason a man in power has summoned a woman beneath him in the black of night was to inquire about her lineage.

A young girl. A foolish girl.

Doma pauses in her ministrations on the barn floor, abandoning her mission to help the new eight servant girls find pallets and straw-woven sacks of wheat to sleep on. Above their heads, in the servant's quarters, the Bolton foot soldiers rage and blow their own horns about the quality of their side in the snatching of Winterfell out of Stark hands. They stir up so loud a raucous, the older woman has to wait until their animated hollers reduce to quieter, drunken ballads of love lost and gained before she speaks.

She wipes her dusty hands on her ratty gray tunic, frayed at the hems with sleeves hanging yards past her fingertips. One look at the young, foolish thing over her shoulder has the girl's mouth clamping down as if it has been sewn shut. In the dim light borrowed from the candles lit around the little alcove, the other girls snigger under their dirt-streaked palms.

Turning to the candle burning to her left, where the cages of slumbering chickens are stacked over one another, and a laid pallet is rolled on the floor beside them, the older woman clears her throat. She achieves the attention of the figure crouched over the measly bed, her hands buried deep in her puff of hair. Silence reigns over the barn, oppressive in its weight.

"Ye don't talk much, but I don't figure ye've got as much rum in yer head as that one over there." Doma gestures to the tiny girl sat near the rabbits, knobby knees pulled up to her chest and pointy chin tucked into the space between them. Her voice is raspy but stern, the corners of her mouth lined with age and turned down at the corners mirroring the mix of emotions pooling in her eyes. "Ye know why that man wants ye in his chambers this late, girl. Ye know."

The woman finishes the last of her braids. Wordless--as the other girls have come to realize she always is--the woman unfurls her legs from under her and sits. Smoothening out the creases birthing at the small pleats of her woolen skirt, she folds her hands and places them between her thighs. She simply stares. Because she does know. Perhaps, she wagers, she knows more than anyone in this little makeshift room of theirs of the appetites of men, and what happens when those appetites are not satisfied accordingly.

She learned these lessons in Lys. Before she decided to come to the North in Westeros, to come to Winterfell, and teach lessons of her own.

A snoring raven flutters its wings, and the noise it makes against the iron bars of its cage startles some of the girls at the back. Unmoved, it must be minutes later that Doma blinks and averts her searching gaze to a listless corner of the barn.

Whatever she sees in the brown woman's eyes causes a shiver to rock her, and she rolls the heels of her socked feet. Her arms around her midsection, as gaunt as it is, the oldest servant sighs, a haunted expulsion of breath. She says, eyes distant, voice the lightest the brown woman has ever heard it be, "Just let 'im have what he wants. And you can't fight 'im neither. Men like Roose Bolton don't like it too much when their girls fight 'em. Or cry. You can't cry. Just let 'im have what he wants."

The other girls nod, some sniff. The brown woman stares. 

The elderly caretaker's gently whispered words follow the woman from the barn and up the steps to the Lord's lodging, tugging at her skirts and clinging to her calves as she ascends the wooden steps. They bounce around the walls of her head as the falling snow melts through her lightweight dress, sending trickles of water down her back. As the Warden of the North welcomes her with a warmed goblet of something foul-smelling and sour-tasting, and invites her to find a resting place amidst the furs and linens smothering his bed. No pallets for him.

Arising out of days of observing him, she understands nearly everything about the new Lord of Winterfell is subdued in nature. From the creeping, unsettling baritone of his voice. To his muted, almost concealed brand of violence and how he delivers it onto those he deems guilty.

Whereas his bastard, Ramsey, proudly takes the symbolism of the crest of the Bolton house and translates it to real world atrocities, a mad dog frothing at the mouth, Lord Bolton is a snake in the grass. No longer than a man's forearm. A mere nuisance at first glance. A raised sword once one's back is turned.

Robb Stark had his back turned. Now he and his kin feed the worms.

The woman has her eyes open tonight. Tonight, the woman would see, and so would Lord Bolton.

Under the witnessing eye of the full moon, she is prepared to glimpse into the well teeming with his deepest depravities. Prepared to be educated in the ways of misery he alone can bestow. The snake opens its jaws wide, revealing two gleaming fangs dripping with a poison that scorches the ground where it falls, and the woman sees.

He asks her to place her cup still sloshing with his fancy ale on the tray laid on the floor beside the bed. She does. Stripping out of his cotton breeches, the creaking of leather as he removes his boots accompany the sounds of her unlacing the ropes tying her dress together at the front.

At the first sight of her bare shoulder, then bare breasts, something akin to, but never quite, for a subtle man like Lord Bolton, longing blossoms upon his countenance under the soft light of the burning fire in the hearth opposite the bed. Lord Bolton, laying comfortably across the bedding, propped up on an elbow as he watches her undress, turns a shade of pink when her tunic falls to the ground and she bends to step out of it. The bulging, fleshy head of his exposed arousal shines, glistening with his apparent need and rolling down his hardened length erect against his lower abdomen. He tells her to seat herself on the bed at once. She does.

She only graces the softness of the fur covers with her back before his hands come upon her. Taking her neck, his short, square fingernails rake down her shoulders and arms. His knees find homes on either side of her hips, and as if he were starved and lost beyond the Wall just the day before, his widened eyes dine to the point of indulgence on the sight of the dark brown disks surrounding her hardened nipples. Poking at her stomach, his cock sears with heat and throbs a constant rhythm. He hums, then gives his tongue leave to sample the firm peaks of her breasts.

The woman too permits her body to react under the circumstances. As that is what men the likes of Roose Bolton truly crave, in the end. Reactions. Affirmations. She'll give them to him, if only to keep him distracted. Occupied.

Unaware.

The blaze between her legs bursts to life with new fervor. Sensation after sensation, wave after wave of unbound pleasure grabs the woman and shakes her until she loses all coherency. Mewls and moans are all that remains even as he shows the shades of his true colours and bites down on her chest until tears bead at the corners of her eyes. He, merely a subject now to the intensity of his own desires, absorbs every pant, every utterance of sex-inspired delight with the same speed with which it is delivered.

Her breast squeezed in his fist and his cock sliding against the slick folds of her sex, Lord Bolton grunts into the nipple still in his mouth, alternating between the two. Saliva and sweat collected around the peak of his chin dribble down the swell of the woman's bosom. His stubble scratches at the thin, soft skin around her nipples. He sucks so deeply, his cheeks hollow, and following a particularly husky cry from the woman beneath him, his eyes close of their own accord.

He's hard and hot. She employs one of the tricks she learned in the whorehouses of Lys; a touch of her fingertips to the head of his cock, oozing his seed on her hip. He abandons her breast long enough to take her face in his hand and seize her lips in a kiss.

Where he is hard and unyielding everywhere else, he's soft there. At his mouth. Soft and warm. 

At his mouth, the weight of his feelings are unable to take their usual place behind the veneer of casual detachment and cold calculation. At his mouth, the woman sees. She sees the trembling of his muscled arms as he cradles her face in his hands and kisses her senseless. The hushed, escaping sounds crawling out of his throat through the corners of his mouth, pair the noisy echoes of their clashing lips and colliding tongues.

The sudden smoothening of the wrinkles on his forehead, as if a burden makes a home of someone else's shoulders finally, and an age-old wrong has been righted at last. As if this, in this room with her legs wrapped around his hips and his mouth pressed against hers, is were he has yearned to be for far longer than the impending winter.

"Mahren, love." Is what leaves him like an exhaled breath when he raises his head and rests his face in the crook of the woman's neck. He peppers her skin with feather-light kisses as he lays there, breathing, absorbing. "How I've missed you."

Wordless. Simply staring. Seeing.

She lets her legs fall to the bed, her ankles sliding against the back of his legs. Opened to him entirely now, she lifts her hips a hair's breadth, and the tip of his shaft light brushes her sensitive nub.

She moans into his ear, and Lord Bolton's breath catches. He takes her then.

For hours and hours. In many ways, and a handful of them hurt, and badly.

Days seemed to have passed by the time the Lord first pulled himself, slick with the evidence of his climax, out from her and rose to stoke the dying fire and add more blocks of dry wood. The woman, bruised in some places and aching in others, laid on her stomach with her face pressed into the linens until he returned and lifted her by her arse to receive him again.

That time was slow, deliberate. He ran his palms up past her waist and back to cup her breasts as he thrust the thickness of himself into her opening. Slow, deliberate. He leaned his chest onto her back, running his lips over the nape of her neck in open-mouthed kisses as she came again around his cock. He called her Mehran more times than she could and would remember.

The fire in the furnace still burns steadily hours later, as the woman rests on her side, nestled in his arms, and his member pressed into her arse, soft. His snores mix with the crackling of burning wood, light yet shallow. He closed his eyes and succumbed to his fatigue half a burning candle after, in the subsequent glow of their tryst. Lord Bolton informed her she would be spending the remainder of the night right next to him, should he have an itch to scratch come the morning light. Obedient, she remains on the sheets stained with their coupling. Wordless, she had not an answer for him when, in the thick of his drowsy ramblings, he asked her why she had only just come back to him now, and if she'd liked a life of hiding all the way in the Summer Isles.

If she had spoken, she may have told him it was Ranima that hid in the Summer Isles. Before Mehran took her in as part of her troupe of actors, the orphan Lysene girl, not much older than the brown woman was now, had run from the men her father had sold her to. She'd hidden in the nooks and crannies of the Islands until she looked upon the shining face of Mehran. Were it not for Ranima and her skills of keeping safe from dangerous men, she may not have been as equipped as she was to save both herself and the baby from the disaster at the Weeping Waters.

She may not have known from past experiences to have a bag packed with as many supplies as she could carry hidden away until it was needed. She may have on that day, seeing in the distance two men on horseback, and one with an archer's bow slung across his back, dismissed the sight as nothing as the others had done. She may have burned to death when that archer strung up his flaming arrow and fired right at the barrels of ale on the upper deck. She may not have made it in time to receive the baby Mehran had pushed into her arms before another arrow had whizzed by them and struck Mehran in the leg. She may not have made it at all.

But she had. Ranima, with the baby named Jasslyn Karstark secured in a sling around her torso, leapt from the blazing ship into the sea and swam for the cover of the nearest jutting stone. There she hid for two days while they searched for survivors and lit what they found on fire. Her legs were stuck in seawater but her waist and upper body rested on the stone. She shared what she had in her bag with the child and wordlessly stared, waiting. The baby, silent. Even little Jasslyn knew what would become of her were the tyrant Lord of the house of flayed men to find her after what her mother had done to him.

For this reason, Ranima knew she and the child couldn't stay in Westeros for much longer, lest they risk being caught. So she took the gold chain around the baby's neck, the last gift from her mother, and sold it at the nearest marketplace. Two days later, she bought a cabin aboard a ship headed for Lys and never looked back.

The baby became a girl in Lys. And when Ranima, sweet Ranima, caught the pox and met with the gods, the girl, ten and five at the time, became a woman. The girl, ten and five at the time, learned things, saw things. The girl, Jasslyn Karstark, lived on her back and had her belly full because of it.

The day a customer made up his mind the girl, Jasslyn Karstark, would be his not whenever she was unoccupied with another customer but always, the girl used what she learned from Ranima, and ran. She'd met a man before whilst working on her back, the girl, and the man had given her a coin. Jasslyn took the coin and went to the place the man had told her about. Jasslyn went to Braavos.

In Braavos, the girl became a woman. In Braavos, the woman became no one.

In Braavos, the woman forgot the somber, alert setting that Ranima's face always seemed to have. In Braavos, the woman thought of her mother only once, when she thought she didn't have what it took to abandon her face, then never again. The woman always thought about Roose Bolton, though.

Now, as his body warms hers on his bed, she thinks about him still. She thinks about all she saw and learned and became, all to lead her there. To his bed. To him. She thinks about what she intends to do now that she is there, in his bed, with him.

He sleeps like the dead, Lord Bolton. He never rises as she stands from the bed beside him, not once. Her feet patting as she walks to where she discarded her clothes at the start of their affair, his snores fill the woman's ears. She kneels, her thighs sticky with his essence, and lifts the dress to turn it inside out. A hidden pocket comes into view. She searches it for its contents and produces a small folding blade the size of her first finger when folded.

She draws the blade as Lord Bolton turns in his bed, rubbing his eyes. He glances around the room, and when his eyes land on her back, he urges her first to return to his side. Then he asks her to turn around so he could see what she has in her hands. She does.

And it's his turn to stare.

**Author's Note:**

> My knowledge of the houses, titles, locations, and intricacies of the Game of Thrones world is limited to the TV show and several Wiki pages. If I made mistakes in this, please let me know.
> 
> I love writing about black characters, characters who look like me, in this setting and world, so I may post another one (?) Might even fuck around and make this a series, but I don't know if my attention span is going to allow me to do that. Oh well.


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